The Virtues Of The Unfamiliar: On Album Spirou #272

I failed to resist this unexpectedly affordable hardback album containing ten consecutive 2003 issues of the Franco-Belgian comicbook Spirou. If only more anthology titles were collected in the form they were originally published. It makes undeniable sense to strip mine out the successive chapters of the most commercially promising strips and publish them as individual volumes. But the original issues of any mix'm'match comic have a fascination of their own. The way in which familiar and unfamiliar tales and styles sit together. The character that individual editions are lent by their unique mix of stories, editorial content and adverts. The choices made about cuts to strips now known as self-contained graphic novels. The suggestion of a single moment in time, complete with all the printed features that would never be collected in their own right, that would never get to live outside of this single context.   

For the reader who knows nothing of any language but English, and I shamefully belong to that tribe, these nigh-on 450 pages sparkle not only with unfamiliarity, but incomprehensibility too. Not only is the language opaque, but so too is everything bar the broadest strokes of cultural context. Some of the creators and stories I know from translations, but most are entirely new. It's as close to a return to the innocence of childhood reading as is possible. Back to when the words were indecipherable and the rules only vaguely grasped. Back to when everything that seemed like comics was by its very nature irresistibly magical. It was all comics. It was all utterly beguiling.

Ignorance can be an astonishingly liberating experience. Preconceptions can be as laid to one side. I've little interest in slapstick, but who's to say that what looks like, say, slapstick in Spirou isn't also carrying a host of other implications? Whose to say that slapstick here has much to do at all with slapstick elsewhere? The absence of the illusion of certainty rekindles curiosity and, yes, affection too. What a relief, to be able to suppress the habit of carelessly dismissing entire traditions in favour of long-established preferences. Automaticity is, to one degree or another, unavoidable. But that doesn't make it any less unhelpful when it comes to making sense of what's right before our eyes.

The more we feel familiar with a subject, the more important it is to be baffled. The more we're baffled, the more we can recapture something of why we fell in love in the first place. Long before I came to believe that I knew what I liked about this aspect or that of comics, I knew without question that I loved comics itself. Genre, medium, history, even individual styles; if they mattered at all, they mattered relatively little. It's the paradox of experience, that it often narrows rather than opens up new ideas and new enthusiasms. The more we know, the more we think we know about what we like and why. Sometimes that may even be true. But it isn't always.

 
At the time of writing, there have been almost 350 Spirou collections. The mind shivers at the space it would take to shelve them all. But what a wonderful thing it would be, to be able to read the comic from its very first edition in that now-impossibly distant time of April 1938. Perhaps to even read the whole run twice. First, without being able to understand barely a word, and then, with the aid perhaps of evening classes and a dictionary, with a basic grasp of French. Yes, there are apparently translations available in this brave, homogenising digital future. But that might just be one step too far in the direction of the comfortably unchallenging.  

(A snowy Sunday lunchtime, 10/12/2017)